With the dawn of modern technical advances comes the ability to duplicate, change, alter and distribute just about anything. The law enforcement organizations have called counterfeiting the crime of the 21st century. Product counterfeiting is a serious and growing threat. Measures to defend against counterfeiters are being taken by many corporations, but they have not developed comprehensive, systematic, and cost-effective solutions to preventing counterfeiting.
Due to advancing counterfeiting techniques, traditional anti-counterfeit technologies are becoming obsolete. Additionally, governments and corporations that have invested a great deal of resources in fighting counterfeiting have experienced little success. Furthermore, law enforcement agencies that are burdened with efforts to combat violent crimes have insufficient resources to fight the “victimless” counterfeiting crime. For example, a company owning a famous brand name may have spent years developing and promoting the superior qualities of its goods to establish good will of the public and may be unable to stop a counterfeiter or a newcomer company product inferior quality goods.
Counterfeiting also extends to identification areas wherein identities, logos, and any other type of indicia may be faked. For example, in a competition, a competitor's racing number and other identification information such as name, sponsorship may be provided in the exterior of a garment such as a sporting bib. If a competitor's racing bib can be counterfeited, this may have serious consequences for the integrity of the sports, causing needless delays and aggravation to the organizers of sports events and sports promoters, as well as lost revenues if fake bibs cannot be detected by security guards or event employees who allow entrance access to a large number of participants in the event of a large competition such as the New York, Boston, or Chicago marathons.
Typically, information may be displayed on the exterior surfaces of garments in different ways, depending upon the nature of the information itself. Some information is permanently attached, such as the silk-screened name of the competitor. Other information, such as a manufacturer's label may be permanently affixed for advertising purposes. Other kinds of information, such as a competitor's racing bib displaying the competitor's number, is required to be attached only during the competition period. In practice, the most common way this is done is by temporarily attaching the racing bib to the garment with the use of safety pins.
Thus, there are no suitable or satisfactory approaches which have been proposed to prevent counterfeiting of sporting bibs if an individual decides to fake information and create a fake sporting bib. At best, manufacturers of racing bibs most often punch holes near the corners of the bibs in order to secure the bibs securely using safety pins, but this provides no defense against counterfeiting. Alternatively, other types of methods may decrease the probability of counterfeiting such as when the user wears the identification indicia which is part of the garment itself. However, even this approach has the disadvantage that counterfeiting of the garment might just as well occur very easily.
Therefore, no solutions appear to provide adequate ways to verify the authenticity of sporting garments and bibs which could stand against clever tampering, copying, spoofing, or other advanced counterfeiting techniques. With all these facts in mind, the realization of a simple method for labeling or printing sporting bibs using high quality anti-counterfeiting standards and a simple method for verification seems to be out of reach.